by J. R. Ward
But he was starting to think that all he'd done was slap a shiny, pretty coat of paint on a rotting barn. He'd never been happy, had taken no joy out of the money he'd made…had deceived honest people and raped countless acres of land, and for what? All he'd done was feed the tapeworm in his gut that had driven him. None of it had nurtured him.
Marie-Terese took his hand. “So…who is that woman? What is she?”
“She's…I don't know how to answer either of those questions. Maybe those two guys who came with Jim can.” He glanced at the doorway and then looked at Marie-Terese. “I don't want you to think I'm a freak. But I won't blame you if you do.”
As he dropped his head, for the first time in a long, long while, he desperately wished he was someone else.
Words were better than nothing when it came to explaining things, but that didn't mean they went nearly far enough in some situations.
This was one of them, Marie-Terese thought.
In her life, things like what Vin was talking about happened in the movies or in books…or they were whispered about when you were thirteen and on a sleepover with your friends…or they were lies that were advertised in the back of cheap magazines. They were not part of the real world, and her mind was fighting the adjustment.
The trouble was, she'd seen what she had seen: a woman with black holes for eyes and an aura that seemed to taint the very air that surrounded her; Vin collapsing and speaking words he didn't seem to hear; and now…a proud man, hanging his head in shame for something that was neither his fault nor his wish.
Marie-Terese kept stroking his shoulders, wishing there was more she could do to ease him. “I don't…” She let the sentence drift.
His reserved gray eyes flicked over to her. “Have any idea what to make of me, right?”
Well, yes…but she wasn't about to put that thought into words for fear it would come out wrong.
“It's okay,” he said, reaching out and giving her hand a squeeze before rising from the bed. “Believe me, I don't blame you in the slightest.”
“What can I do to help?” she asked as he walked around.
He looked at her from over by the window. “Get out of town. And maybe we shouldn't see each other. It may well be safer for you and that is the single most important thing to me right now. I'm not going to let her get you. No matter what I have to do. She is not going to get at you.”
Staring up into his face, she felt a stirring down deep as she realized he was her real-life fairy tale: Standing before her, he was willing to do battle for her, on whatever killing field the war took place…He was prepared to accept wounds and make sacrifices for her…He was the dragon slayer she had looked for when she was younger and had lost faith in ever finding as she'd aged.
And just as important, when it would have been easier for him to believe the lies that woman had said, when he could have listened to Devina spinning that total fallacy about her having been with Jim, he had chosen to think more of her, instead of less. He had had faith in her, and had trusted in her, in spite of her past and his.
Tears stung her eyes.
“Look, I should go downstairs and talk to them,” he said roughly. “You might want to leave.”
But she shook her head and rose to her feet, thinking that two could play at the knight-in-shining-armor game. “I'll stay, if you don't mind. And I don't think you're a freak. I think you're…” She tried to choose the right words. “You're just fine exactly the way you are. More than just fine—you're a wonderful man and a great lover and I just…like you.” She shook her head. “I wouldn't change anything about you and I'm not scared of you, either. The only thing I might wish were different…is that I met you years and years ago. But that's it.”
There was a long stretch of silence. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely.
She went to him, and as she wrapped her arms around him, she murmured, “You don't have to thank me. It's how I feel.”
“No, it's a gift,” he said into her hair. “You always should thank the person who gives you something irreplaceable, and to me…acceptance is the most priceless thing you could ever offer me.”
As she choked up against his chest, he spoke three little words: “I love you.”
Marie-Terese's eyes popped, but he pulled back and held up his hand to keep her from stammering. “That's the way I feel. That's where I am. And I don't expect any kind of response. I just wanted you to know.” He nodded to the door. “Let's go down and face the music.”
When she hesitated, he tugged her gently. “Come on.”
After he kissed her, she allowed herself to be led from the room. And considering the way her head was reeling, she was impressed that her sense of balance was good enough that she made it down the stairs and into the living room without falling over.
Even as they joined the others, she felt she should say something back to him, anything, but he honestly didn't seem to be waiting for reciprocation or even an acknowledgment.
Which made her feel honored in some strange way—probably because it meant that his gift to her was unconditional.
The men had obviously found the beer, as they all had bottles in their hands, and Jim introduced the two who'd come with him to her. For some reason, she trusted them all—which was very unusual given the way she usually felt around big, muscle-bound members of the opposite sex.
Before any of them could speak, she said loud and clear, “What the hell is she? And how worried do I need to be?”
The men all stared at her as if she'd grown two heads.
Eddie, if she heard the name correctly, was the first to recover. He leaned forward and put his elbows on his jeans-clad knees. After a moment of concentration, he just shrugged, like he'd tried to find a way to sugarcoat things and decided to give up on the lie.
“A demon. And very concerned barely covers it.”
Chapter 35
Vin was totally impressed by his woman. Having just been through a hideous and frightening welcome-to-the-unreal-world, and then having gotten hit with an I-love-you bomb, she was holding her ground, staring at Eddie with steady, intelligent eyes as she absorbed his answer. “A demon,” she repeated.
As Eddie and Adrian nodded in unison, Jim just took a seat on the couch, put his cold beer bottle on his swollen face and leaned back into torn-up cushions. The rippling sigh that came out of his mouth seemed to suggest that new bruise he was sporting looked bad, hurt worse.
God only knew how he'd—oh wait, Adrian's knuckles were split.
“What does that mean?” she said.
Eddie's voice was level and reasonable. “Your common conception of one is largely accurate in her case. She's an evil entity who overtakes the lives and then the souls of people. She's hardwired for destruction and she's after Vin. Anything or anyone who gets in the way is in immediate danger.”
“But why Vin?” She looked across the way. “Why you?”
Vin opened his mouth and nothing came out. “I…I really don't have a clue.”
Eddie paced around, going from the bookshelves to the ruined mirror. “You said you went to a psychic who gave you a ritual to perform. What did you do to call her to you?”
“But that's the thing,” Vin said. “I didn't call her at all. I was trying to get rid of the visions. That was it.”
“You did something.”
“It wasn't to volunteer for this shit, I assure you.”
Eddie nodded and glanced over his shoulder. “I believe you. The trouble is, I'm pretty damn sure that you were set up. I don't know what you were told exactly, but I'm willing to bet it was not about dumping those trances. The thing is, for Devina to go to work, you have to give her a way to get in.” Eddie refocused on Marie-Terese. “So in this case, I'm thinking what he was told to do opened him up wide and Devina took advantage of it.”
“So she's not tied to his visions?”
“Nope. She can eclipse them as long as her hold on him is strong—but he's probably getting them again because the tie
is weakening a little. As for, why him? Think of it like…the metaphysical equivalent of a car accident. Vin was in the wrong place at the wrong time, thanks to some very bad advice.” Eddie met Vin's eyes again. “That psychic—how did you find you her? Did she have some kind of vendetta against you?”
So the visions were going to come back. Great.
“Ah, I didn't even know her.” Vin shrugged. “She was just some woman downtown who I went to randomly.”
Eddie seemed to shudder—as if Vin had just told the guy he'd had a plumber operate on his colon. “Yeah, okay…and what did she tell you do?”
Vin wandered around, hands on his hips. The night that he had gone upstairs and locked himself in his old room came back to him—and what he remembered doing was not exactly something he felt comfortable sharing in very mixed company.
Eddie seemed to get that. “All right, we'll come back to that. Where did you do it?”
“In my bedroom. At my family's house—Wait, wait, hold the fuck up here…am I responsible for all this?” Vin rubbed his chest, the crushing weight over his heart making it difficult to breathe. “If I hadn't gone to her, I wouldn't have…lived this life of mine at all?”
The silence was the answer, wasn't it. “Oh…fuck me.” And then it dawned on him. Devina had said that she had given him everything…did that also mean she'd taken things away as well? “Oh, my God…even the deaths? You're saying…I'm the cause of the deaths, too?”
“Which deaths?”
“My parents'. They died a week or so later.”
Eddie looked over at Adrian. “That depends.”
“On whether I ever wished them dead?”
“Did you?”
Vin stared at Marie-Terese and hoped that as he answered, she saw the regret in his eyes as he spoke. Shit, his parents had been horrible to each other and worse to him, but that didn't mean he wanted to be the cause of their demise.
“There were two things I wanted when I was younger,” he said harshly. “I wanted to be rich and I wanted to be out from under their reign of terror.”
“How did they die?” Eddie asked quietly, like he knew this was tough stuff.
“After I., did what I did up there in my room, I just went about normal life, you know? School—well, kind of school, because I skipped out a lot. I never thought it worked, and then I didn't really think about it all. It wasn't until it dawned on me that I hadn't collapsed in a full week that I started to wonder if I might have fixed what was wrong with me.” Vin went over to look out at the view, but instead ended up staring down at a stain on the carpet. It had been made by the broken bourbon bottle, and the dark round mark was the kind of thing no rug cleaner was going to get out. “I remember coming home from working my father's shift, which I used to do when he was too fucking drunk to stand. It was about midnight. I put my hand on the doorknob and I glanced up at the full moon and I was psyched as I counted all the days that had passed. I was like, Huh, you don't suppose I'm okay now? And then I walked into the house and found the two of them covered with blood at the bottom of the stairs. They were both gone—and it had probably happened because one of them had pushed the other and gotten pulled along.”
“You are not the problem here,” Eddie interjected.
Vin braced his palms on the window and dropped his head. “Fuck me.”
For no good reason, and probably because it was the only thing that could make him feel worse than he did at the moment, he thought of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. A specific one. The only one that had been made for him by his father.
The two of them had come home from a job late and there had been no dinner on the table. Which made sense, because the only person who could have made it was passed out on the couch with a cigarette having burned to ash in her hand.
His father had headed for the beer in the fridge, but had broken with tradition by taking out the bread and the jam and the peanut butter on the way there. He'd lit a cigarette, laid out four slices, hit the strawberry and then the Jif. After grabbing a Miller, he'd tossed one of the sandwiches at Vin and walked out of the kitchen.
There had been black fingerprints on the white bread because his father hadn't washed his hands.
Vin had thrown the sandwich in the trash, used the sink and the soap, and made himself a clean one.
For some reason, he regretted now that he hadn't eaten the damn thing.
“What did you do?” Eddie asked. “What was the ritual?”
“The psychic told me…” Vin ricocheted back in time.
After having collapsed in front of the school at a fucking pep rally, he'd had it—and had gone to the newspaper looking for psychics because he figured if they saw into the future like he did, then maybe they'd know how the hell to stop seeing things before they happened.
Saturday morning he'd gotten on his bike and ridden all the way down to the riverfront, to a bunch of ratty little storefronts with cheap neon signs that said things like “Tarot Here!”, “Astrology Readings!”, and “100 % Accurate! $15!” He'd walked into the first door that had a palm with a circle on it, but there had been a line. So he'd gone to the next one and found it locked. The third one was the charm.
Inside, the dark place had smelled like something he couldn't recognize. Dark. Spicy. Later he learned it was no-holds-barred, grown-up sex.
The woman had come out from a beaded curtain and she'd been dressed in black, with black hair and black eyeliner—but instead of a caftan and a wig and wrinkled lids, she'd been in a catsuit and looked like something out of Playboy.
He'd wanted her. And she'd known it.
As the echo of meeting her rippled through him, he shook himself back to the present. “I told her what I wanted and she seemed to understand immediately. She gave me a black candle and told me to go home and melt it on the stove. When it was liquid, I was supposed to pulled out the wick and put it aside, then—” He glanced at Marie-Terese and wished like hell he had another story to tell. “Then I was supposed to cut some of my hair and put it in, along with some blood and…ah…something else…”
Vin was so not the kind of guy who minced words or stuttered. But admitting to a peanut gallery and a woman he wanted in his life that whacking off had been part of the deal was not the kind of admission he was in a big hurry to make.
“Yeah, okay,” Eddie said, saving his ass. “Then what.”
“So I was supposed to cool the wax, re-form it with the wick, and go upstairs. Get naked. Draw a circle with salt. Ah…” He frowned. Weird, the first part was so clear; precisely what he'd done next was not. “It's fuzzy from then on…I think I cut myself again and dripped the blood into the center of the circle. I lay down, lit the candle. Said some words—I can't remember what they were exactly. Something like…I don't know, calling things to lift burdens or some shit.”
“Which was actually bullshit,” Eddie said with a hard tone. “But then what happened.”
“I don't…I can't remember precisely. I think I just fell asleep or something, because I woke up like an hour later.”
Eddie shook his head grimly. “Yeah, that's a possession ritual. The wax she gave you had parts of her in it, you added your half and that was how the door was opened.”
“You're saying…that was Devina?”
“She comes in a lot of forms. Male, female. She can be an adult, a child.”
Adrian piped in. “We don't think she jumps to animals or inanimate objects. But the bitch has tricks. Big-time. Is there any chance we can get access to that house? Or are we going to have to break in?”
“Actually, I own it still.”
The two guys took a deep breath. “Good,” Eddie said. “We're going to need to go there to try to get her out of you. We've got a better chance of success if we return to where the ritual was performed.”
“We're also going to need to get your ring back,” Adrian added.
“The diamond?” Vin asked. “Why?”
“That's part of the binding. Jim said he thou
ght it was set in platinum?”
“Of course it was.”
“Well, there you go. Noble metal, and a gift from you to her.”
“But I didn't give it to her. She found it.”
“You bought it for her, though. Your thoughts and feelings when you purchased it are embedded in the metal. The intent is transformative.”
Vin eased off his hands and stood up properly. Both of his palms left prints on the slick, cool glass and he watched them fade. “You said she steals souls. Does that mean she's going to want to kill me?”
Eddie's voice was low. “But we can try to stop that.”
Vin turned around and looked at Marie-Terese. She was subdued as she leaned against the archway into the room, and he went to her, taking her into his arms. As they embraced, he was amazed and grateful once again that she accepted him…even after another layer of the onion had just been peeled back.
“What can we do to keep Marie-Terese safe?” he asked. “Is there anything she can do to protect herself? Because Devina just left here after having seen us together.”
As the guys considered his answer, her eyes flashed up and then slid over to Eddie. “I'm leaving town tonight—for reasons other than all this. Will that help? And are there any…ah, spells, or…?”
The hesitation spoke volumes about both her disbelief and her resignation that all this freaky shit had just put the “real” in her reality.
Eddie met her stare head-on. “Devina can be everywhere and anywhere, so the answer for keeping you safe is freeing Vin—we get her out of him, then by definition you're off her radar, because you are not the one she wants or has claimed. She only has eyes for him—and anything that keeps him from her.”
Adrian cursed. “Bitch only cares about people she's put her name on. It's one of her few virtues.”
“Maybe the only one,” Eddie seconded.
“So let's do it,” Vin cut in. “Right now. Let's go to the house and take care of this, because Devina left in a hurry for God only knows what. I don't want her coming back here and—”
“She's going to be tied up for a while. Trust me.” From across the way, Adrian smiled like a motherfucker. “She hates messes, and I'm really fucking good at making them in her drawers.”